Around 3,500 people have been killed in the three decades of violence in Northern Ireland that ended only with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. One of the most tragic chapters of this violence is represented by the terrorist attacks in Birmingham 50 years ago. The anniversary of the Birmingham attacks, which claimed 21 lives, will be commemorated on Thursday, November 21.
An anonymous caller announced on November 21, 1974 at 8:11 p.m. local time, that there are bombs planted in two pubs in the city center. Seven minutes later, the first device exploded, and almost immediately the second one as well. 21 people died in the explosions – seven women and 14 men aged 16 to 56 – and another 220 people were injured. It was one of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the United Kingdom.
Responsibility for the terrorist attacks is widely attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a paramilitary organization fighting for Irish independence and unification, although it has never officially claimed responsibility. That evening, British police detained five suspects on a train who were going to the funeral of an IRA bomber. He blew himself up in the city of Coventry a week earlier. The next day she detained another.
In 1975 they appeared before the judges who member of the so-called The “Birmingham Six” received life sentences for the bombings. The judges were based on the conclusions of the West Midlands Police investigation. The following year, however, the convicts filed their first appeal – unsuccessfully. The second attempt to get justice in 1987 also failed.
Only the third attempt in 1991 was successful, because it gradually became clear that they had to sign confessions under physical and psychological pressure, and forensic evidence was also questioned. The Court of Appeal decided that the convicts were wrong, definitively annulled the sentences and imprisoned them released after more than 16 years on March 14, 1991. The case is widely regarded as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the history of the British judiciary, which later led to the establishment of the Criminal Investigation Commission.
One of the six unjustly convicted men, Paddy Hill, declared after his release: “The police don’t want to go into the (IRA) investigation because there are too many unpleasant facts behind it. I think Birmingham police are not interested in the truth – they are rotten. I am skeptical about the truth coming out.”
Coroner Louise Hunt said in 2016 that there was still a lot of raw evidence about the incident. The investigation therefore remains open, with the families of the deceased continuing their efforts to bring the real perpetrators of the 1974 Birmingham terror attacks to justice.
